Summary
Watson suffers a little again from Season 2’s needless insistence on including Sherlock Holmes, but “Lucky” has stronger character work than usual.
I’ll be the first person to admit that Watson doesn’t need Sherlock Holmes. It works better without him, actually. But Season 2 is obviously adamant about weaving him into the goings-on, so we have to deal with it, and the arc I do like about Episode 5, “Lucky”, is that Watson is steadily realising that perhaps he doesn’t need his friend and mentor as much as he always thought – and, thus, that perhaps the show doesn’t need him either.
It’s a weird arc, I’ll grant you that, since it’s cynically introducing Sherlock for the sake of it and then taking several episodes to clarify that he didn’t need to be there in the first place. This episode also introduces another Holmes connection that it’s hard to take as anything other than a replacement villain, but we’ll get to that. It’s just a tricky predicament to be in, I think, since the show is built and marketed around a connection to Sherlock Holmes but doesn’t benefit on any level from leveraging it.
“Lucky” – so-called because it’s the name of the patient of the week, a man with locked-in syndrome mistakenly diagnosed as being in a vegetative coma, who may or may not have witnessed several murders committed by a crazy nurse – deploys a similar gimmick to Sherlock’s previous appearance, with Sherlock lurking around Watson’s apartment and baiting him into oversharing details so he can offer outside-the-box solutions. It sort of works on a general level, but it mostly made me think how annoying it must be to have Sherlock Holmes as a mate. You get home after a long day, and he’s trying to bait you into a fencing match? Not for me.
Again, though, the point of “Lucky” – or so it seems, anyway – is to have Watson gradually realise that Sherlock’s solutions to problems are sometimes more overblown than the problems themselves, and that Watson’s carefully cultivated way of doing things has explicitly evolved beyond Sherlock’s wacky “I’m a genius so it’ll all work out” approach. What I’m hoping – this in a bit of a whisper – is that Watson is realising this will mean less Sherlock in the future. I like Robert Carlyle in the role, but the show’s better without him, and there’s only so much I can tolerate of Watson acting like toad in the hole is some kind of esoteric bushman meal.
Anyway, where Watson Season 2, Episode 5 does excel is in the smaller character interactions, which is interesting since it’s usually where it fails most obviously. But we get a bit more playful stuff about the relationship between Sasha and Stephens here, which has barely been brought up again since it was introduced in the premiere, and while it’s largely meaningless, I appreciate its presence nonetheless because the show has a terrible habit of just introducing character subplots out of nowhere and expecting us to care. These two are starting to feel like a couple, not just because of getting frisky all over the place, but because we’re actually seeing them support one another through difficult personal moments. It’s small stuff, but it’s the kind of small stuff that Watson often totally overlooks, so it warrants a mention when it’s here.
I certainly prefer this in a romantic context to Watson and Mary’s will-they-won’t-they dynamic. There’s virtually none of that here, which might feel like a blessing, but since there’s also no Laila either, it reinforces the idea that the show simply hides problems it doesn’t know how to address.
Ingrid, I’m less sure about. But what I suspect is that her rather suspect interactions with the guy in her therapy class, dovetailing with the ground she’s making in her personal relationships, especially with the Crofts and Sasha, suggests that we’re heading towards a personal test in her journey of self-discovery where she will either revert to minor villain mode or showcase her evolution by refusing to be swayed. And it’s almost certainly going to be the latter, since those relationships she’s working on, and the awkward, unsure attempts she’s making at being a more open, understanding person, are likely to pay off down the line when she encounters a problem she needs support to deal with. It’s fairly standard storytelling, and the fact I’m so confident it’ll play out in this precise way suggests it’s too predictable, but with Watson typically being so bad at this kind of thing, it’s a novelty that there’s any kind of consistency whatsoever.
And then there’s Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s notoriously unscrupulous brother, who it turns out technically owns Watson’s clinic on account of Sherlock being dead (which he isn’t, obviously, but thus far Watson hasn’t mentioned this to anyone). I’m sure this will be a bit of an issue as we go, but if we’re going to look on the bright side, Mycroft as a character does suit this show a little better than Sherlock does. But time will tell in that regard.
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